they will of course blame the vendor, like everybody else does.

Has anyone ever wondered about the point of yubikey and all its other buddies who offer to encrypt your offline drives if you'll only make sure they can hold your keys? What happens when your key dies? What happens when they go out of business? What happens when they get bought by a disreputable entity? How long before they realize they have all your data captive and turn into ransomware? Also... hasn't the Windows OS itself provided built-in drive encryption since Win2K, or at least since Vista (bitlocker), for free? Have they removed that feature in Win11?

The irony of offline drive encryption is that if it's offline, it's completely impossible to break in and take info from it. Anything that is not made available online or to a computer that is unsecured is not reachable. Why do you need to encrypt it? Yup, it's argued that if you plug it into another PC that is compromised, then your data is still protected, however, if you knew it was compromised, would you ever plug in that external drive that contains all your sensitive data? And if you don't know it's compromised, why are you plugging it in unless you're planning to unencrypt it to view the data on it? Once you unencrypt it, it's the same as if you'd plugged in a non-encrypted drive, no? This one just cost you more, and gave you more obstacles to get to your data which was otherwise secure anyway when it was offline.

For me, the only point of ubikey and others like it, is just to spend more money to encrypt something that you wish to send to someone else and it will not be in your possession while sending. To save money it would be simpler and faster to just encrypt the files themselves and transmit them over sftp, but sending a secure USB flash drive feels much more spy-novel intriguing.

My approach to securing my data is: don't share it, don't store it on anyone else's computer (cloud), and i don't leave the keys with anyone else to hold. Nobody else needs to be introduced to my mother, my pets, my first teacher, my fingerprints, my eyeprints, my faceprint, my finances, my id, or the arrangement of every neuron and my genome, and every time Adobe or TurboTax or Apple get hacked, i don't have to up my game by paying for id protection.

Technology